


How To Mess Up A Confession

by Chromi



Series: Someday, So I Believe [MarcoAce Week 2019] [6]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Idiots in Love, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Marco is An Idiot, MarcoAce Week 2019, Oblivious, Pining, Suggestive Themes, Thatch is Vulgar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 23:05:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21242171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromi/pseuds/Chromi
Summary: “Whyhim,” Marco hissed at Thatch the next day, slumped at the little table in the back of the kitchen while Thatch rolled out dough at the counter beside him, “why do I, someone tipping into qualifying for a free bus pass on most islands, have to fall for someone likehim, a damn nineteen-year-old pyromaniac? I hate myself, Thatch. I really do. And I hate him.”





	How To Mess Up A Confession

**Author's Note:**

> For MarcoAce Week 2019 on Tumblr - day 6, for the prompt "confessions".

Ace was impossible to get alone. Completely, totally, and utterly impossible. Why was he always surrounded by people as he was? Why, exactly, did Ace have to park himself right in the center of any and all social situations, flanked on all sides by men in his division, by the other commanders, by Deuce and his fellow ex-Spades?

Hell, Marco was certain that Ace didn’t even sleep in his own damn room, choosing to have random sleepovers with his division instead of taking to the privacy of his personal, secluded cabin, the likes of which were reserved only for commanders. Ace thrived, it seemed, on being around people constantly, never giving himself a minute to be alone and equally never giving Marco a hot second to speak privately with the most sought-after man on board the Moby Dick.

_Why _did Marco have to fall ridiculously head-over-heels in love with someone so popular, and thus someone he couldn’t hope to confess his undying affections to?

Ace was never left alone, and so Marco suffered.

Thatch, however, being the absolute treasure that he was, was on hand to assist. Or so he would like to think, in any case.

“I’ll tell him I need him in the kitchens,” Thatch hissed as Marco chugged his tenth tankard in a row, barely giving himself time to breathe in his quest to black out and forget about how badly he wanted to rip Ace’s stupid shorts off his stupid body, “I’ll say the main stove’s bust or something. Yeah, that’d work. He’ll come down with me, you’ll be in there waiting, and I’ll just leave you to it. No one will disturb you,” Thatch cracked his knuckles threateningly, “not with me on the case. You watch, you’ll be balls-deep in the lad by the end of tonight.”

But much to his frustration, Marco categorically did not end up pulverising Ace’s ass into next Wednesday.

Because when Ace turned up in response to Thatch’s summons, he had Deuce, Mihar, and Skull in tow like a happy little reunion from their Spade Pirates days.

“The guys don’t believe that I really do help you with the cooking,” Ace said to Thatch with a frown at his former crew members. “They think I just stand around and get in your way or something, so they’re here to witness the greatness that is Ace the Assistant Chef.” It was only then that Ace noticed Marco, who was trying his damn best to shrink into the shadows and scuttle away, defeated. “Oh, hey, Marco,” Ace said cheerfully, “you here for a cooking lesson or something?”

Fuck Ace. Fuck his friends. And fuck Marco’s heart for yearning for someone so out of his reach.

Ah, he was far too old for this nonsense.

“Okay, so that plan didn’t work,” Thatch conceded the next evening, once again dropping down beside his best friend who was steadily working his way into inebriation, “so how about this instead. I’ll convince Ace to take my shift on watch tomorrow, right, and so when he’s up there all on his own, you can fly up there and kiss him until he says, ‘take me right here, Marco’.”

It was a great plan – why hadn’t Marco thought of that? Ace was guaranteed to be alone – no one _ever_ offered to join the watchman on shift, after all – and Marco would have all night to pour his heart out and, with a bit of luck, have Ace pour something quite different down Marco’s throat.

Only this was _Ace_, and he was _Marco_, and since when did any of this ever go right for him?

That whole assumption that no one would be selfless enough to join the watchman on shift was not, for maybe the first time ever, proven to be true when involving Ace. Ace, who had kindly agreed to swapping with Thatch, had somehow managed to get Haruta to join him up there.

“Are you looking for Thatch?” Ace asked innocently when Marco discovered the two commanders huddled over a game of cards, his mouth hanging open in a gape that both Ace and Haruta misread to mean he was shocked by the lack of pompadours in the crow’s nest. “He said he had something important to do, so I agreed to swap shifts with him. You wanna stick around for a hand?”

No, Marco did not. Marco wanted to go to bed and rub one out while imagining things had gone to plan and he had finally been able to tell Ace that he was weak and in love and just wanted to kiss his idiot face.

His idiot face with those sweet, sweet freckles, strong jaw, thick brows and deep, soulful gray eyes…

“Why _him_,” Marco hissed at Thatch the next day, slumped at the little table in the back of the kitchen while Thatch rolled out dough at the counter beside him, “why do I, someone tipping into qualifying for a free bus pass on most islands, have to fall for someone like _him_, a damn nineteen-year-old pyromaniac? I hate myself, Thatch. I really do. And I hate him.” Marco considered this for a moment, then corrected himself, “actually, no, I love him so much I could die. Maybe I will. Maybe phoenixes explode in a ball of flames when they experience unrequited love, because it sure feels like that’s the way I’m going.”

“Nah,” Thatch said dismissively as he kneaded the dough, his tongue sticking out between his teeth in concentration, “that feeling? Yeah, that’s you getting backed up. Your balls are gonna burst if you don’t smash Ace’s ass soon, mate. Trust me on this.”

Thatch, ever the romantic.

And speaking of romantics – what may have been even worse than Thatch’s bluntness and his failures of plans was when Deuce, Ace’s freaking best friend, approached Marco one afternoon under the guise of needing advice about a patient.

“I got the feeling you didn’t want us there on that day we turned up in the kitchen,” Deuce muttered, leaning in close so that the nurses couldn’t hear them, “so I wanted to apologise for getting in your way. You like Ace, don’t you?”

Marco grumbled something indistinct. So even Deuce could tell? Why was it that Deuce could see what Marco thought to be reasonably obvious to anyone with a set of eyes, yet Ace clearly could not? Oh, Marco had dropped hints plenty of times, ranging from describing his perfect person as someone like Ace to flat out saying _I like you_ to the young man, only to receive a pat on his arm and told _aw Marco, I like you too! _So if Deuce could get it, why couldn’t Ace?

“He won’t believe you, by the way.”

Marco looked up from his textbook that he had been pretending to read, studying Deuce’s masked features.

“Why not?”

Deuce shrugged. “He doesn’t think anyone actually likes him. Or, rather, he spends half his life convincing himself that no one does because of his father. So, unless you literally go up to him and kiss him, he won’t pick up on any cues you might think are only too clear.”

It was so obvious now that someone had said it. So painfully evident in all that Ace did every single day since Marco had known him.

“So that’s why he’s never alone?” Marco asked in a hushed voice. “That’s why I can never find him on his own? Why he even sleeps with his division?” Deuce simply nodded, and Marco felt himself bristling. “Well, he’s wrong,” Marco said shortly, “couldn’t be more wrong if he tried. You think the sun shines outta his ass, everyone in his division worships the ground he works on, Thatch seems to think he’s the guy’s parent, and I’m helplessly in love with the fool. So, he’s wrong. He’s adored by literally everyone he meets.”

“You honestly think I haven’t spent the last two years telling him that?” Deuce sounded somewhat cold, as if Marco had just announced that the doctor’s unwavering loyalty to his ex-captain was false. “Like I said, words won’t have any effect on him. I’m not sure if actions will, either; funnily enough, I’ve never tried kissing him and seeing what happens.”

“Well, thanks for the advice,” Marco said, and he meant it, too. He felt that apologising might have been the way forward, but he had more serious matters to attend to, such as pinning Ace down and kissing him until he recognised that yes, actually, there was at least one person in the crew who loved him more than life itself.

Pride be damned; Marco wasn’t a particularly proud man to begin with, never taking jokes at his expense too seriously and always open to constructive criticism. Kissing Ace in front of whoever happened to be hanging onto his every word right this minute? Marco could definitely do that. Now that he’d properly learned of Ace’s deep self-esteem issues (because what else did you call that?) he couldn’t wait for Thatch to succeed in getting the guy alone. He couldn’t wait for an opportunity to arise that found Ace on his own for once in his life. Hell, Marco was fairly certain that Ace didn’t even _piss_ alone; he had never seen him coming out of the bathrooms without an escort, in any case.

And, as usual, Ace was indeed the life and soul of the large gathering of men on the deck when Marco located him.

“Marco!” Ace greeted him happily, waving at him as Marco strode to the group, “you wanna come listen to Jonno’s story about his mermaid he swears he saw?”

No, no, _no_, Marco did not want to hear about what Johnson the Unlucky thought he had seen while drunk off his face. Marco didn’t want any of them around at all, but he had no choice, he _had _to act now, while Deuce’s cruel reminder of Ace’s sadness echoed in his mind.

So Marco grabbed Ace by the wrist and, before Ace could ask what was the matter, had pulled him into a fierce kiss.

There was complete silence. The kind of silence that seemed to go on forever and ever, where the sound of one of the men swallowing seemed to ring across the deck like a foghorn. But Ace’s lips were warm to Marco’s, soft and pliant when moved against, with Ace returning the kiss as if the reaction had been shocked out of him.

Marco stepped back after what felt like an age and yet equally barely a second, drawing a sharp breath at the way Ace leaned forward to chase after his movement, eyes still closed from the kiss.

And then Jonno wolf-whistled and the moment was shattered, the men breaking into laughter and further whistles of their own.

“Nice going, Commander!”

“Who’da thunk it – Commander Marco’s got a thing for our boy!”

“Commander, was that your first ever kiss, by any chance?”

Ace didn’t reply, not even when nudged for a response by a couple of the men. His eyes had fluttered open and he couldn’t seem to tear them away from Marco’s cobalt blue pair, searching his expression.

“What was that for?” Ace asked after several tense heartbeats, touching his lips with the pads of his fingers, and _good god_ if that wasn’t a delicious image right there. Marco swallowed, at a loss for words for possibly the first time in his life.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I love you,” Marco said, willing his voice not to shake, “so I thought I’d show you instead.”

“You _love _me?”

Marco nodded. “I’m in love with you,” he confessed, blunt and open as always, a thrill of nerves shooting through his gut as he finally said the words, “and completely crazy about you.”

Ace looked vaguely uncomfortable as his men hooted and hollered their laughter around him, making obscene suggestions as to what Ace could do with that knowledge.

“Why _here?” _Ace groaned, jostled by the men around him all reaching to either pat him on the back in congratulations or to nudge him with a wink.

That much should have been obvious, Marco thought.

“You’re never alone,” he blurted out, the irritation he had been harbouring threatening to spill at the oblivious expression on Ace’s face and the way his men refused to just _give them some space_. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to get you alone so I could tell you properly? And then Deuce said—” no, that wasn’t important right now; Ace didn’t need to know that detail, “I mean, Thatch and I have been trying our damned hardest to get you on your own, but it never seems to _work_.”

Ace, to Marco’s amazement, frowned at him. “You could have just asked for a private word whenever you wanted,” he pointed out very reasonably, earning nods from several of the men, “no one would have thought anything of it. Would you, guys?”

“Nope,” Jonno said at once.

“No, sir.”

“Not even a little bit, Commander.”

Marco was, without a shadow of a doubt, a complete idiot. Ace knew it, if the smirk that was growing on his lips was anything to go by, and his men _definitely _knew it, judging by their laughter and glee at this new development.

But before Marco could properly process just how incomprehensibly moronic he was, Ace stepped in closer, looking up at the blond through his eyelashes.

“You wanna go for a walk and tell me all about your feelings and shit like that?” Ace asked, casual as you like. “I promise you’ll have me all to yourself.”

Marco swallowed, and nodded, and took Ace’s hand in his own when it was offered to him.

“Yes, please.”

**Author's Note:**

> Is it rushed? Yes. Is it bad? Also yes. Would this have been three times longer if I'd had the time to make it so? Again, yes. But unfortunately I'm back at work and spent eight hours today working through a backlog of prescriptions, so I guess I have that going for me right now.
> 
> I'm gonna make it up to you guys so hard when this event is over, just you w a i t.
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](https://aishitekuretearigatou.tumblr.com/) if you want to come say hi!
> 
> Comments and kudos let me know if I'm doing something right, and I always love your feedback!


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